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The symbols of 1957 were two pale, clear streaks of light that slashed across the world's night skies and a Vanguard rocket toppling into a roiling mass of flame on a Florida beach.
With the Sputniks, Russia took man into a new era of space, and with its advances in the art of missilery, posed the U.S. with the most dramatic military threat it had ever faced. And with the Vanguard's witlessly ballyhooed crash at Cape Canaveral went the U.S.'s long-held tenet that anything Communism's driven men could do, free men could do better. Whatever the future might bring, in 1957 the U.S. had been challenged and bested in the very area of technological achievement that had made it the world's greatest power.
The shock wave from that reversal ran, perceptibly and profoundly, through the world's watching millions, disturbing the U.S.'s friends, cheering its enemies, swaying the uncommitted, as eyes in African jungles and Asian market places, in European town squares and American suburbs strained skyward for a glimpse of Russia's tiny moons. In 1957, under the orbits of a horned sphere and a half-ton tomb for a dead dog, the world's balance of power lurched and swung toward the free world's enemies.
On any score, 1957 was a year of retreat and disarray for the West. For Britain and France, the U.S. allies who fill out the world's Big Four, the year's theme was a recessional. Sir Anthony Eden, physically sick and spiritually drained after the fiasco at Suez, resigned as Prime Minister. His successor put out a White Paper proclaiming that Britannia was done with ruling the waves, was thinning out the proud red line of far-flung posts on which the sun never set, and withdrawing to a more realistic stance as a tidier, tighter nuclear power. Guy Mollet, the other architect of the Suez failure, fell from power in his turn, but France fought out its frustrations in Algeria, where 39,931 perished in the year's most bitter war.
Ritual & Blunder. Moving to order the political disorder left in the Middle East by the withdrawal of France and Britain, the U.S. briefly seized the initiative by proclaiming the Eisenhower Doctrine of aid to any Middle Eastern land asking for help against Communist attack. The President's pledge and the Sixth Fleet's presence gave Jordan's spunky young King Hussein heart to eject ministers talking of Soviet alliance and to line his country up in the ranks of the West. But when the Soviets countered with a coup that put proCommunists on top of Syria's army, the U.S. blundered into trouble, airlifting arms to neighboring Jordan with such zealous haste that even its Arab friends felt obliged to pledge ritually their support to the Syrians in the name of Arab unity. At home, the big U.S. news of 1957 was the unhappy sight of paratroopers with bayonets, called out reluctantly by President Eisenhower to enforce a federal court order admitting Negro pupils to Little Rock's Central High School over the defiance of Arkansas' Governor Orval Faubus.
Unquestionably, in the deadly give and take of the cold war, the high score for the year belongs to Russia. And unquestionably, the Man of the Year was Russia's stubby and bald, garrulous and brilliant ruler: Nikita Khrushchev.